Beer price index 2016: which cities had the world's cheapest and priciest beer

A beer can cost a few cents or several dollars depending entirely on where it is poured. GoEuro's 2016 Beer Price Index put an exact number on that gap, pricing a 33cl beer in supermarkets and bars across 70 cities worldwide, and the spread between the cheapest and priciest of them was enormous.

What the index actually measured

GoEuro, the Berlin-based travel-search site that was folded into the Omio brand in 2019, built its Beer Price Index by pricing a standard 33cl beer in both a supermarket and a bar in 70 cities, then averaging the two figures into an "overall average price" for each. Because supermarket and bar prices move so differently from one city to the next, a beer bought a few steps from a bar tab, the index also tracked the mark-up between the two: in some cities a bar pour cost barely more than a shop-bought bottle, and in others it cost ten times as much.

The cheapest beer in the world, 2016

Of the 70 cities GoEuro priced, Bratislava, Slovakia came out cheapest overall, at an average of $1.14 for a 33cl beer, just $0.35 bought in a supermarket, $1.93 at a bar. Seven of the ten cheapest cities in the index were in Eastern Europe:

• Bratislava, Slovakia — $1.14 overall average
• Kiev, Ukraine — $1.15 overall average
• Cape Town, South Africa — $1.29 overall average
• Krakow, Poland — $1.30 overall average
• Mexico City, Mexico — $1.47 overall average

The mark-up between shop and bar prices could be startling even in the cheapest cities. In Bratislava, the same beer that cost $0.35 in a supermarket cost $1.93 at a bar, a 451% increase. In Budapest the gap was wider still: a $0.28 supermarket beer became a $3.13 bar beer, a mark-up of just over 1,018%.

Lausanne: the world's most expensive beer

At the opposite end of the table sat Lausanne, Switzerland, where a beer at a bar averaged $12.20, by far the highest bar price GoEuro recorded. Set against Kiev, one of the cheapest cities for a bar beer at $1.82, Lausanne's price was more than six times higher (12.20 ÷ 1.82 ≈ 6.7).

A beer at a bar in Lausanne cost, on average, more than six times what the same 33cl pour cost in Kiev.

Prices were falling almost everywhere

Year-on-year, GoEuro reported that beer prices fell in 63 of the 64 cities it had tracked in both 2015 and 2016; only Malaga, Spain recorded a rise, of 23%. The average fall across those cities was about 24%, and the ten biggest fallers all dropped by more than 30%, led by Rio de Janeiro (−43%), Geneva (−43%) and Munich (−42%). GoEuro did not publish a like-for-like index again after 2016, so there is no directly comparable follow-up figure to confirm whether that decline continued.

Who actually drinks the most beer

Beyond price, the same 2016 dataset tracked per-capita beer consumption across its markets. The Czech Republic led the way at roughly 144 litres per person that year, its 24th consecutive year as the world's heaviest beer-drinking nation according to Kirin Holdings' Beer University Report, ahead of Poland (127 litres) and Serbia (119 litres). Despite drinking the most, none of those three countries spent the most on beer annually, since their low prices kept the yearly bill down. Lausanne told the opposite story: at just 56 litres per person a year, comparatively modest consumption, its residents still topped the annual-spend table at around $1,118 per person, purely on the strength of its prices.

Reading a 2016 index today

These figures are a decade-old snapshot, not a live price list. GoEuro's Beer Price Index was never repeated after its 2016 edition, and the company itself no longer trades under that name. Currency swings, inflation and years of hospitality-price rises mean actual beer prices in every city above have almost certainly moved since, in some cases sharply. The value of the 2016 index is in the comparison it captured at a single moment: how far apart the cheapest and priciest beer markets in the world really were, and how much of that gap came down to the bar mark-up rather than the beer itself.

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